Acoustic Imaging With Circular Microphone Array: A New Approach for Sound Field Analysis

Acoustic imaging is powerful in collecting spatial information of acoustic sources into a visual representation. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of the exterior acoustic field captured by a circular array of microphones. With a proper parametrization based on angles, we map the directions of arrival of sources as a function of the microphone locations, thus obtaining an acoustic image called “angular space”. Therefore, we introduce a linear transform to enable analysis and synthesis operations for mapping the microphone pressures onto the angular space using local space-time Fourier analysis. We prove the ability of this representation to combine global information coming from multiple arrays in a single acoustic image that can be processed and manipulated. Examples of source localization applications in simulated and measured scenarios show the effectiveness of the proposed method obtaining results comparable with state-of-the-art methods.